Scientists have accidentally figured out how to make phone batteries last forever

Scientists, eh. What are they like? They're always spending hours and hours, erm, sciencing and coming up with ways to dramatically change our lives through very well calculated science experiments.

Saying that, sometimes they just accidentally drop something in weird gel stuff and change the world forever.

Scientists have accidentally discovered a way to make phone batteries last forever. That's right – never again will you have that soul-destroying moment of realisation that you're out and about and your phone's down to 2%. How are you supposed to see how many people have liked that photo of your lunch that you posted to Instagram earlier? Life is so unfair.

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Phd student Mya Le Thai from the University of California at Irvine was mucking around with some weird gel recently when she realised that by coating the brittle component in batteries in a shell, they can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and not lose any power.

Apparently the components within batteries don't cope well with charging in your bog standard lithium battery and start to wear out after roughly 7,000 cycles. But with this new manganese dioxide shell, batteries lost no power despite the fact they were cycled an incredible 200,000 times in just three months.

Reginald Penner – chairman of UCI's chemistry department – told The Inquirer: "[Mya] discovered that just by using this gel she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.

"This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."

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